A number of approaches exist for providing participants in financial markets with information about the behavior of such markets. In some cases, a simple textual display of the price or other characteristic (e.g., trading volume) of one or more instruments (e.g., stocks, bonds, etc.) being traded on a financial market may be presented. For example, a “stock ticker” may provide a market participant with real time, or near real time, information about the prices of each of multiple stocks. The stock ticker may serially display stock symbols and associated prices on some medium of expression, such as a paper tape, a television screen, or a computer terminal. One drawback with such an approach is that a market participant may have to wait to obtain information about a particular instrument of interest as the ticker cycles through a potentially large number of other instruments (e.g., all stocks on the Standard and Poor's 500 Index). Accordingly, access to specific information may be particularly inefficient.
In other cases, information about financial instruments may be represented in tabular form, with various financial instruments arranged in some ordering (e.g., alphabetically by stock symbol, etc.), so that market information may be efficiently indexed, searched, or otherwise obtained by a market participant. Such an approach may however also suffer from various drawbacks. For example, such tables of information about financial instruments in at least some cases do not reflect real time information about the behavior of a market, as they may be compiled over relatively large time intervals (e.g., at the end of every trading day). In addition, such a table may present a particular market participant with far more information than they desire, since the table may include many stocks not of interest to the market participant (e.g., when the table includes information about every stock being traded on an exchange).
Other techniques for providing market information include graphical views, such as a two dimensional graph of the price of a particular financial instrument over time. Such graphs typically include plots of raw prices for a particular financial instrument observed at various points in time. Such plots may not aggregate and efficiently display information about trends, tendencies, or other patterns of behavior that may influence a market participant's decision to trade (e.g., buy or sell) a particular instrument. In addition, such graphs typically cannot simultaneously provide a viewer with information regarding trends over multiple different time periods, such as long-term (e.g., year scale) and short-term (e.g., day or week scale) trends.